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and your younger brother to see the professor of Islamic law in Los Angeles when you were thirteen? His house had been converted into a home for lost books. There was hardly any space for him or his family to live. He showed us the thousands and thousands of books that he had collected over a lifetime of study. He told us about the ancient texts that he had acquired that outlined approaches taken by early Muslims that have faded from memory. These are arguments that had been put forth by our predecessors. And were they any less Muslim for having explored ideas? For having asked questions? For having considered possibilities? I want you to look at the theological literature of Judaism and Christianity, as well as that of Buddhism and Hinduism. I want you to read the great works of philosophy left to us by the Greeks but also by the Arabs. I want you to open your eyes and mind to the philosophers of the world throughout the centuries. There is tremendous value in acquainting yourself with the questions this literature attempts to resolve. In fact, you will find the subtlety of human perception overwhelming. And when a friendly Muslim cleric tells you that reading such literature is wrong, tell him that you can only know it is wrong after having read and understood it. There is no knowledge that is wrong. Only knowledge that is difficult, troubling, enlightening, liberating, and intoxicating. Your friendly cleric will tell you that everything is already in Islam. And he will be telling you the truth. But you can tell him that human perception is not equally distributed and that you want to discover how others have perceived the world around us. Perhaps their descriptions will help you align yourself with your faith even more than before. I find this to be the real gift of others—the elegance of their perceptions, the labor that has been put into developing interesting positions, and the perfection of expression. Just as you read fiction in order to discover the names for emotions and experiences that we have all had, you read the philosophy and theology of others in order to enrich your own perceptions. And finally, if your friendly cleric tells you that everything has been answered in the texts of our forefathers, you can tell him that you believe that every generation of Muslims should reexamine their faith and their understanding in the terms that they understand. You and your generation were formed, and constituted, at the start of the twenty-first century. Your minds are a mix of ideas, habits, traditions, and the effects of technologies and travel that would have made no sense to Muslims in the 1950s, let alone in the tenth century or the seventh century. You and your friends need to reexpress Islam in the words and the needs of your generation. Different lived realities compel us to change focus and to rearrange priorities. So I end this letter with a choice for you. You can choose to live as a Muslim who insists that only Muslims are able to have knowledge, wisdom, and understanding. Or you can choose to find knowledge, wisdom, and understanding in all cultures, literatures, and philosophies. You can choose to be locked into a particular world, or you can set forth into a world of human experience.
SERMONS AND WHAT TO EXPECT IN THE MOSQUE ON FRIDAYS Habeebie Saif, When I was your age, I would go to the mosque on Fridays. The communal prayer was always an opportunity to feel connected with other people of all types. We would line up in rows, rich and poor alike, and we would go through the prostrations and recitals required of Muslims. Before the prayer started, we would all sit facing the front of the mosque and listen to the imam, or prayer leader, deliver his weekly sermon. Most of the time, I did not understand what he was saying. My Arabic language knowledge was not very strong. The parts I did understand usually involved the invocations to Allah to protect Muslims around the globe and defeat the enemies of Islam. My memory of these visits to Friday prayers is a mixed one. The beauty of prayer and communal worship, as we all prostrated in unison, whispering the prayers and verses of the Quran that form part of the event—I cherish this memory. But the violence and aggression of the sermon was something that my friends and I would always wonder about. This has become a very serious topic around the Muslim world since, and you can visit mosques today where the tone has changed significantly. I was fifteen when I first went to boarding school in the UK. I headed to the mosque on the first Friday—our day of rest and the day for communal prayers—instead of going to chapel, as the other children did. This was the understanding that I had with the school. My fellow Muslim schoolmates and I made our way down the suburban roads of the school’s town. The houses got smaller and smaller as we progressed. The neighborhood was clearly not wellto-do. Finally, one of my friends pointed out the house that had been designated as a mosque. Small, residential, and made of red brick. It was one of a hundred cookie-cutter houses of suburban England. We took our shoes off before stepping into the brightly lit interior. The house had been converted by having key walls removed to make way for a large prayer room. Multicolored silky Chinesemanufactured prayer mats were lined up untidily. We muttered shy greetings to the already gathered attendees. They were all dressed in South Asian clothes and seemed to know one another well. All older than us. I came away from that suburban mosque shocked at what seemed to be an extremely violent Islam. While the sermon was being conducted in a language I did not understand, but believe to have been Bengali, I was given little leaflets with machine guns drawn on them and injunctions to kill various
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Begin Reading Table of Contents Abo
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To my mother for all her patience,
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PREFACE I have two sons. My older s
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My work in diplomacy came later, an
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playground gossip about the Jews or
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THE GRAY AREA Habeebie Saif, You ar
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debates that are taking place in Eu
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have your favorites. My favorite is
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They have stories to tell you about
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LANDSCAPES OF ISLAM Saif, You know
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Yemen, you will find an intellectua
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lot of power and influence at stake
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egion—are dry and relatively hars
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FRAGMENTS OF MEMORY Habeebie Saif,
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impossible to know what my father d
Page 33 and 34: THE LIMITS OF WHAT WE CAN KNOW Dear
Page 35 and 36: MY FIRST DARK DAYS Saif, The summer
Page 37 and 38: He took out a pen and paper and beg
Page 39 and 40: clearly that Allah may intend for u
Page 41 and 42: and therefore, there is some kind o
Page 43 and 44: spread of the Islamic values of res
Page 45 and 46: Perhaps an extended statement like
Page 47 and 48: most important ways are going to be
Page 49 and 50: our lives. I believe we owe that to
Page 51 and 52: Orthodox Islam brought the spiritua
Page 53 and 54: So there are leading Muslim figures
Page 55 and 56: home you were discriminated against
Page 57 and 58: the earth at the end of our lives
Page 59 and 60: accordance with the Quran and the P
Page 61 and 62: would wonder why I could hardly mem
Page 63 and 64: slightly more at ease in a world of
Page 65 and 66: VIOLENCE Habeebie Saif, As much as
Page 67 and 68: they commit. I want you to see how
Page 69 and 70: ROLE MODELS Habeebie Saif, You will
Page 71 and 72: are always called to return by thos
Page 73 and 74: Everyone seemed to have had a cousi
Page 75 and 76: Qutb was an extremely fluent and pe
Page 77 and 78: eject it, as is possible in Western
Page 79 and 80: Of course we instinctively want to
Page 81 and 82: REVELATION AND REASON Habeebie Saif
Page 83: that for a thousand years we have t
Page 87 and 88: y its practitioners. Do you underst
Page 89 and 90: differs from the Sunni method. The
Page 91 and 92: opened up the world of knowledge an
Page 93 and 94: knowledge from other cultures—cul
Page 95 and 96: learning from their stories. In his
Page 97 and 98: Remember that I realized that what
Page 99 and 100: MEN AND WOMEN Habeebie Saif, You ha
Page 101 and 102: asic respect that any human being d
Page 103 and 104: FREE SPEECH AND THE SILENCE WITHIN
Page 105 and 106: a dream come true. Some people cher
Page 107 and 108: A CLOSER LOOK AT A MORAL CONUNDRUM
Page 109 and 110: When he saw them again, he inquired
Page 111 and 112: choices that have been made for us
Page 113 and 114: likelier to see life for what it is
Page 115 and 116: ABOUT THE AUTHOR Omar Saif Ghobash
Page 117 and 118: Contents Title Page Copyright Notic
Page 119: LETTERS TO A YOUNG MUSLIM. Copyrigh
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